by H. W. Brands
The result was a measure that reflected democratic politics at its best, which was to say welfare reform that made neither side ecstatic but that substantially improved on the status quo. Eligibility requirements were stiffened, reducing the number of recipients by hundreds of thousands. Payments to those remaining on the rolls were increased, to reflect more accurately the cost of California living. Taxpayers saved billions.
A SECOND MEASURE of his second term made Reagan almost equally proud. Real estate values had been rising in California for years, pushing up property taxes, which became a heavy burden on pensioners and other owners whose incomes didn’t rise commensurately. Reagan wanted to provide relief. Meanwhile, he and the rest of the state’s elected officials found themselves under court order to make more equitable the state’s education spending, most of which came from property taxes. The desire for property tax relief and the need for equalization seemed at first to work at cross-purposes, but after some false starts Reagan and Moretti managed to produce another compromise. The measure reduced property taxes while boosting state support for schools, especially those in poorer districts.
NIXON’S WELFARE PLAN fared less well than Reagan’s, struggling in Congress for two years before the president set it aside ahead of the 1972 election. Nixon, anyway, had other priorities, starting with the most audacious restructuring of international affairs since the beginning of the Cold War. Even casual observers of communist-bloc politics noted during the 1960s that the bloc wasn’t what it once had been. The Chinese increasingly condemned what they called the Kremlin’s “revisionism”: its unwillingness to push world revolution in all places at any cost. By the decade’s end the acrimony had grown so virulent that Chinese and Soviet troops exchanged fire across the border their countries shared in northeast Asia. American and allied leaders didn’t have to be unduly Machiavellian to wonder if the Eastern troubles might be turned to Western benefit.
In fact Richard Nixon was Machiavellian, and turning those troubles to America’s benefit was precisely what he had in mind. Nixon understood that the enemy of an enemy can be, if not necessarily a friend, at least a useful associate. He proposed playing the Chinese against the Russians, and the Russians against the Chinese, to America’s advantage. He hoped the two communist powers could be persuaded to reduce their support for the communists of Vietnam, thereby easing an end to the war there. More broadly, he looked to augment America’s usable leverage in world affairs.
But it was tricky business. Americans like to believe that their country’s policies are rooted in principle. For a quarter century they had been told, and had been telling themselves, that America’s enemy in the Cold War was communism—godless, authoritarian communism. Neither Russia nor China had abandoned communism; neither had embraced God or democracy. But Nixon wanted to work with them nonetheless.
He moved stealthily. He sent Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, to Pakistan on a seemingly innocuous diplomatic mission. While in Karachi, Kissinger complained of stomach troubles of the sort travelers are prone to. He encouraged the reporters traveling with him to take a few days off while he recovered; they wouldn’t be missing anything. And then he slipped across the Himalayas in a Pakistani plane and surfaced in Beijing, where he met with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, respectively the reddest of the “Red Chinese” and the ablest of China’s diplomats. He delivered American greetings and wishes for constructive relations. They responded in kind.
Nixon and Kissinger reveled in their coup. Nixon called the opening to China “the most significant foreign policy achievement in this century.” Kissinger arranged a visit to China by Nixon himself. “We have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history,” Kissinger told the president after returning to Washington. “The process we have now started will send enormous shock waves around the world.”
The shock waves rolled most powerfully to Moscow, as Nixon intended. The Kremlin would have to be cooperative lest America get too chummy with China, Nixon reckoned. And this was just how things developed. The president traveled to Beijing in February 1972 and professed Americans’ friendship for the Chinese people. He urged rapid progress toward goals the two nations shared. “Seize the day, seize the hour,” he quoted from the canon of Mao’s wisdom. In his own words he declared, “This is the day, this is the hour for our two peoples to rise to the heights of greatness which can build a new and better world.”
The Kremlin was listening, as became evident three months later when Nixon arrived in Moscow. Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev couldn’t let Mao and Zhou get all the love from the Americans; Brezhnev consented to the first major arms-control accord of the Cold War, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT. As part of the deal, the two sides agreed to forgo a weapons race in anti-ballistic missile defenses; the ABM Treaty placed strict limits on missile defense. Brezhnev also put his signature to what amounted to an armistice in the Cold War. The dozen basic principles of détente, as the armistice was called, began with an affirmation that in the nuclear age there was no alternative to peaceful coexistence. Despite their different belief systems, the United States and the Soviet Union would pursue normal relations based on “sovereignty, equality, non-interference in internal affairs and mutual advantage.” The subsequent principles wordily reinforced this live-and-let-live approach.
EVERY REVOLUTION HAS to cope with the forces of reaction, and the revolution in global affairs Nixon attempted with détente was no exception. But before reaction could mobilize, Nixon cruised through the election of 1972. The Democrats had difficulty attracting strong candidates into the primaries, so formidable did Nixon seem on account of his shrewd maneuvering between liberals and conservatives and his clever conduct of American diplomacy. Yet even taking that into account, the Democrats outdid themselves in nominating the weakest candidate in their party’s modern history. Nobody thought George McGovern was anything less than an honorable man, but South Dakota has never grown much presidential timber, and McGovern’s positions on crucial issues placed him considerably to the left of the middle ground that always decides presidential races. The Republicans scorned him as the “triple-A candidate,” the spokesman for “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” referring to the hippies he was said to attract, the pardons he advocated for some Vietnam War resisters, and the support he promised to advocates of abortion rights. McGovern had scarcely been nominated before he appeared certain to become for the Democrats in 1972 what Barry Goldwater had been for the Republicans in 1964: a principled disaster.
Yet Nixon wanted more than a victory; he wanted a landslide. Hubris had set in, and he countenanced a campaign of dirty tricks against the Democrats. He later claimed that he feared for national security after the leaking and publication of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War. But the political espionage set in motion by the Nixon White House went far beyond trying to plug leaks, and when five administration operatives were arrested at the Watergate office complex in Washington in June 1972, their target was the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon denied advance knowledge of the affair, and his denial held long enough for him to win an enormous victory over McGovern. He garnered 61 percent of the popular vote and carried forty-nine states.
The landslide seemed an irrefutable endorsement of moderation in politics. In 1964, American voters had rejected Goldwater’s rigid conservatism; in 1972 they refuted McGovern’s bleeding-heart liberalism. Nixon appeared to have found the magic middle ground. Americans looked to government to ensure that they didn’t suffer old-age poverty and untreated illness, they counted on government to clean the air and water and safeguard the workplace, and they insisted that government protect minorities against public discrimination. Yet they didn’t want government to do everything for them, preferring to do for themselves what they reasonably could. Government wasn’t their enemy, but neither was it their best friend. Most of all, Americans rejected passionate appeals from either left or right for any dr
astic altering of the status quo. And judging by their embrace of the uncharming Nixon, they put little store in charisma.
And then, almost before he was reinaugurated, Nixon’s presidency began to unravel. A federal judge in the District of Columbia refused to accept the Watergate burglars’ guilty plea, and they started to talk. The trail of evidence led back to the White House and, under congressional investigation, into the Oval Office itself. The charisma-less moderation that had been Nixon’s trademark became his undoing, for no zealous admirers rallied to his defense. One by one Republicans abandoned the president, until he stood almost alone against the Supreme Court, which heard his plea to retain crucial recordings of White House conversations. When the high court ruled against him, the House of Representatives moved toward impeachment. In August 1974, Nixon resigned the presidency, handing the White House to Gerald Ford.
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ON THAT DAY Reagan gained hope for life after the governorship. As pragmatic as he proved to be as California’s chief executive, he would never have been mistaken for a Nixonian moderate. The California constitution didn’t bar a run for a third term, but he didn’t want to be seen as a professional politician, let alone a permanent occupant of the governor’s office. If there was a public role for Reagan after Sacramento, it was in Washington or nowhere. Until Nixon imploded, nowhere seemed the likelier option.
Reagan would turn sixty-four a month after leaving the governor’s mansion. He would be old enough to retire from full-time work, and with the money he could earn from speeches and service on corporate boards, he and Nancy would be able to live in all the comfort they could wish. But he still wanted a stage. And the only one that appealed to him at this point in his career was the presidency.
He understood at once what Nixon’s resignation meant. The road from Sacramento to Washington was suddenly wide open. Nixon was no longer around to anoint a moderate successor. Gerald Ford would be the favorite for the Republican nomination, but Ford wounded himself badly by preemptively pardoning Nixon weeks after taking office. Democrats and not a few Republicans muttered about a backroom bargain: the presidency for the pardon. Those who knew Ford didn’t believe the charge. But that didn’t lessen the damage it did him.
IN JANUARY 1975, Reagan handed the California governorship to Pat Brown’s son. The succession suggested that Reagan’s mark on the state might be fleeting, for Jerry Brown was cut from considerably more liberal cloth than Reagan. Or perhaps Brown’s election simply reminded those paying close attention that Reagan’s style of governing had always been more pragmatic than his style of speaking.
Once again Reagan had to figure out how to fill his time. Of course he would run for president in 1976, but he mustn’t appear overeager. He needed to seem gainfully occupied. Ranch life beckoned, and he answered the call. He had sold his Malibu ranch about the time he was elected governor; as he prepared to leave office, he and Nancy purchased another ranch, in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara. They called it Rancho del Cielo—Ranch in the Sky, or Heavenly Ranch—and Reagan devoted hours and days to renovating the house and improving the nearly seven hundred acres.
His service as governor had eaten dramatically into his income, but eight years as chief executive of the nation’s most populous state simply made him more appealing on the lecture circuit. Vacating the governor’s office also allowed him to resume his broadcast career. He received offers to become a television commentator but opted instead for radio. Michael Deaver was stunned. “Walter Cronkite had called me, which impressed me, and said that he would like to have Reagan do a twice-weekly five-minute commentary on the CBS Evening News,” Deaver recalled. “Well, I thought this was incredible. The CBS Evening News, at that point, was 30 or 40 million people a day. Then, this old guy from Hollywood named Harry O’Connor, who was a radio producer who didn’t have any active clients at the moment, had come in and seen Reagan and told him he could get him on the radio, a five-minute radio show a day. So, the hour of decision came, and I thought this was going to be a slam-dunk. And Reagan said, ‘I’m going to do the radio show.’ I said, ‘What? You’re not going to do the CBS?’ ‘No, I’m not going to do the CBS Evening News.’ I said, ‘I don’t believe this. I can’t believe this.’ He said, ‘Mike, people will tire of me on television … They won’t tire of me on the radio.’ ”
Deaver later acknowledged that Reagan had been right. “At the end of that, when we finally had to give it up”—in 1980—“we were speaking to about 50 million people a day on the radio. In the key cities, New York, L.A., we were speaking to them twice a day, both commute times, morning and evening.” Deaver recalled being asked a question by Walter Mondale, by then the former vice president (and the Democratic nominee in 1984): “Do you really think that radio show had any impact on Reagan getting the nomination?” Deaver replied, “I think it had every thing to do with it.” Mondale said, “Well, I’m thinking about doing that myself, a radio show.” Deaver said, “Well, good. Mr. Vice President, let me just tell you one thing. Ronald Reagan wrote every radio show himself.” Mondale said, “You’re putting me on.” Deaver said, “No. He wouldn’t let anybody write them. He’d let Pete”—Hannaford, a staffer—“write his newspaper column, but he always said, I think I can write the spoken word better.”
When Reagan predicted that people would tire of him on television, he might have been indulging the vanity of the aging actor worried about his appearance. His hair remained black—naturally so, he told anyone who inquired, and his barber never contradicted him. But his face and neck showed the inevitable lines and creases. He understood that his age would be an issue in a run for the presidency, and he had no desire to imprint an old face on the public mind.
He could indeed be vain about the way he looked. As a person in the public eye, he couldn’t avoid cameras, but he kept still photographs to a minimum. Michael Deaver noticed that he always grew tense when a still photographer approached him. “Finally, one day I said to him, ‘I don’t get it,’ ” Deaver recalled. “ ‘How come when I bring a still camera in here, I can see the back of your neck stiffen?’ He smiled at me and said, ‘You’re the first person who ever said that to me.’ He said, ‘Mike, I can never recover from a still photographer.’ ” Television pictures were fleeting; an unflattering image was gone in an instant. But not so with a still shot. “I can’t recover from a still,” Reagan said.
Vanity wasn’t the only issue, though. Reagan understood that radio was a more intimate medium than television. It was far more suited to the personal stories and anecdotes that had long been his greatest strength in touching the heartstrings of his audiences. On television, if he told an uplifting story about a soldier home from Vietnam or a cautionary tale about a welfare queen on Chicago’s South Side, the medium would almost require him to show pictures. And the pictures would diminish the impact of his words. On radio the words were everything, spoken in his wonderful voice, which, if anything, grew more seductive with the throatiness of age. Reagan remembered the effect of Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats; he recalled the mental images Roosevelt had conjured with spoken words and the feelings he elicited. Roosevelt hadn’t had an alternative to radio in that pretelevision age; Reagan did have one but declined to use it. He judged that he couldn’t do better than his political hero in trying to reach and touch his fellow Americans.
HE HAD NO policy agenda beyond basic conservative principles. He expected events to furnish direction. They obliged from the start. Three months after he left Sacramento, the final chapter of America’s Vietnam War came to a disillusioning end. The army of North Vietnam, flouting a 1973 agreement under which the United States had withdrawn its troops, overran South Vietnam and captured Saigon. Two decades of American effort to prevent the conquest had failed.
Reagan blamed a failure of leadership in Washington. “When we withdrew our forces from the long bloodletting in Vietnam,” he told his radio audience, “we did so with the understanding that we would provide weapons and ammuniti
on to enable South Vietnam and Cambodia to resist if the North Vietnamese violated the negotiated ceasefire.” Reagan wasn’t surprised that the cease-fire had failed. “Violating agreements is standard operating procedure for communists. They violated this one 72,000 times in the first twelve months.” But Washington, or rather the Democrats who controlled the legislative branch, had let them get away with it. “We do nothing because the Congress has taken from the commander-in-chief the authority to take any action at all to enforce the terms of the treaty. Now that same Congress, with unprecedented irresponsibility, has refused to authorize the money that would permit this great nation to keep its pledged word.”
Reagan recalled for his listeners the domino theory of the 1950s, which asserted that the fall of any country to communism would risk the fate of an entire region. And he reminded them how the domino theory had followed from the failure of appeasement before World War II. “Those who ridicule the domino theory believed it when Hitler was picking off small nations in Europe thirty-seven years ago,” he said. “They just don’t believe it applies when the enemy is communist and the countries losing their freedom are Asian.” But it did apply, he said, as much as ever. “The term domino theory very simply describes what happens to our allies if we back down and let one ally be taken over by the communists because we don’t want to be bothered. The enemy decides it’s safe to go after others—that we represent no threat to his aggression. But even worse, our allies, no longer able to trust us, start making deals.”
The deal making had already begun in Asia, Reagan said. Thailand was turning its back on the United States and negotiating with China. The Philippines were seeking accommodation. Japan had commenced discussions with Hanoi. Nor was the damage confined to one region or continent. “The dominoes are worldwide.” Turkey was drawing away from NATO. Greece snubbed visits by the American Sixth Fleet. Portugal was tilting dangerously left. “Secretary of State Henry Kissinger returns empty-handed from the Middle East. A few months ago the power and reliability of the United States had brought the Israeli-Arab conflict closer to peace than at any time in fifty years. Now there is talk of war by summer. The press described Kissinger’s eyes as wet with tears of frustration. Our one-time power and reliability are no longer believable because of our failure to stand by an ally in far-off Indochina.”